Web of Deceit

I hear a lot of folks crying about advertising on web pages.
One camp says they’ve gotten too aggressive, to the point you can’t access any content unless you permit the most egregious demands for placing tracking cookies, tracking webbugs, tracking scripts, etc., and the most annoying assortment of moving and disgusting images all over the page, hiding the content and necessitating you keep clicking through 15 pages of this junk to get 200 words of content.
The other side whines and cries that were it not for all this annoying crap, they couldn’t afford to post all that marvelous content. What they hope you ignore is that crap advertising usually only comes with crap content.
Let’s pretend for a moment the entire Internet protocol had to be changed for security reasons, and only few and tiny static images were permitted, say four, with each 1000 words of text. No more fancy multimedia, etc. What would change? We would probably lose anything which requires a fat budget to operate. Lots of servers are unplugged, lots of very well established web portals shut down, etc. All your big name major networks disappear or drastically reduce their footprint to reduce costs.
Since when did any of those sources do anything good and right? Where do you get the most reliable and useful information? I doubt much of it comes from sites which rely on advertising.
I was online just before AOL became the biggest ISP in America (though I never used them), and Prodigy was still big business. People still used OS/2 a lot. And there wasn’t much advertising, except at the few sites which were basically run by advertisers. You knew which ones they were, because the only ones with fancy stuff were the ones which had something to sell, a desperate need to get your attention. So they threw in some real information and “free” services as a bone to readers who had grown up with bulletin boards and newsletters with actual news about stuff you really wanted to know. There were even ISPs which offered free connections in exchange for advertising; remember NetZero, Juno, etc.?
Since then, we have somehow shifted to a thinking we cannot have an Internet without all these big advertising sites which masquerade as information portals. In this age when intelligent humans have long since realized the only reliable sources are among the bloggers and independent academic researchers, and hobbyists for entertainment, only the whiny mindless consumers are dependent on those noise portals.
So if the Net suddenly changed so all that crap was gone, what would we have left? Free bloggers, hobbyists and independent academic researchers. I realize ISP charges will likely go up in the long run, because it won’t be as it is now, a generic essential utility like telephones. Still, I have to wonder what would actually be lost? Okay, let’s compromise. Let’s give the popular consumers their own network via cellphones, and move the tablets to it. Or, hey, just let them keep the old protocols, or whatever new ones are being developed for them, and give us something different on the same wires.
Right now, I’m already among the tiny minority who uses software which blocks the most annoying garbage. I use Opera and keep cookies disabled by policy, only allowing certain sites. It allows fine tuning a whitelist policy and on-the-fly options such as allowing JScript at all. Most of the time I stick with Lynx. So few of us use these measures, the advertisers lose nothing because those of us willing to go that far would be the last people to buy anything from them in the first place.
The point is, those who know already understand it’s all a bunch of whining.